The Scottish Higher Education Employability Forum (SHEEF), formerly the Scottish Higher Education Employability Network (SHEEN), has funded a number of employability projects. These projects are being led by members of the Employability Co-ordinators' Network (ECN), a national (Scottish) network of employability practitioners created to support the Scottish Funding Council's Learning to Work initiative.
SHEEN Sharing
The SHEEN Sharing project, led by Cherie Woolmer at the University of Strathclyde, investigated and trialled the use of a range of web technologies to support the ECN with developing, sharing, evaluating and disseminating employability resourses. The project produced two main outputs. The fist of these is an online social networking and bookmarking group for resource sharing using the tool, 'Diigo'. The second is an open website entitled 'Employability Resources for Higher Education in Scotland' delivering dynamically updated and recommended employability resources to the sector using 'Netvibes'. The sites can be accessed via the links below.
Diigo Employability Group
Employability Resources for Higher Education in Scotland
Personal Development Planning for International Postgraduate Students (PIPS)
The PIPS project, led by Joy Perkins at the University of Aberdeen, aims to:
• design and develop a generic bank of innovative personal development planning (PDP) resources;
• pilot PDP materials and activities with taught postgraduates in a representative sample of institutional types;
• evaluate, review and disseminate the developed generic PDP resource bank.
The project will run in four phases. Phases I and II are now complete. Reports examining staff and student perceptions of PDP from Phase I are available via the link below:
PDP resources from Phase II are hosted on an Intranet site. Access is available by contacting Dr. Joy Perkins (j.perkins@abdn.ac.uk).
PIPS PDP resources will also be accessible from the new SHEEF (Scottish Higher Education Employability Forum) website, which will be launched in September 2011.
Work related learning in the voluntary sector
Following research into the requirements of the HE and voluntary sectors, this project, led by Fiona Boyle at Queen Margaret University, provided paid placement opportunities to seven students across five different voluntary organisations. The experience of both the organisations and the students was extremely positive with the organisations commenting on the quality of the work carried out and the students indicating that the placements were an insightful learning experience. This project was a pilot initiative which formed the basis of the current Learning to Work Two Third Sector Internship project, funded by the Scottish Funding Council, which aims to provide placement for 2-300 students.
